As other manufacturers look to bring devices for your wrist to market bearing marked similarity to their phones, Pebble has gone in the other direction, focusing on its seven-day battery life and a simple interface. Last week, we stopped by Pebble’s Menlo Park office to chat with CEO Eric Migicovsky about the thinking that went into the new watch. Read More

Google Contacts is getting an update. Contacts sits at the core of services like Gmail, Google+, Hangouts and others, but it never felt like Google was putting a lot of resources into this service. Now, it’s not only getting a new look, but also a couple of new features that will make using it a bit easier.
The new look takes its cues from Google’s other services that have adopted… Read More

Microsoft announced two new phones yesterday, the Lumia 640 and the Lumia 640 XL. The inexpensive devices are designed to handle global communications, built with dual-SIM slots and the like. They also included something curious: Free Office 365 for a year.
The company currently offers a Surface bundle that includes Office 365, and a cheap HP laptop recently shipped with the same. I confirmed… Read More

Apple’s first wearable is right around the corner, and the Apple Watch will likely debut along a very healthy selection of third-party apps. It might be hard to envision just how those apps will work, however, especially for potential buyers who don’t have the luxury of being able to wander over to an Apple Store and check one out in person. WatchAware, a new site from the… Read More

42Floors, the startup that’s built a platform for finding and leasing commercial office space, has laid off around half of its staff as part of a plan to refocus on its core search business, TechCrunch has learned.
A total of 14 people across 42Floors’ San Francisco and New York offices were let go today, we’re told. That’s around half of 42Floors’ workforce. The… Read More

Gradberry is launching today out of Y Combinator to connect companies with vetted technical talent. Candidates quickly build a talent profile, connecting their GitHub, online portfolios and projects, and LinkedIn account. The talent profile is then vetted by the Gradberry team and approved candidates are passed along to specific employers. Read More

Twitter’s Digits, a developer-facing service launched last fall that offers a way to integrate a simpler, password-free login option into third-party mobile applications, has been expanded today with a pair of new features, including a friend finding function and two-step verification. While already Digits was offering a more secure way for users to log into apps by using their phone… Read More

This week’s Droidcast is all about Mobile World Congress, where HTC unveiled some surprises in addition to the HTC One M9, and Samsung changed up its design strategy with a new take on the Galaxy that replaces boring old plastic with exciting metal and glass. Will the premium look make up for trade-offs in terms of user accessible storage and batteries, and can in-house processors push… Read More

Apple will hire its contract security staff on a full-time basis, a decision that continues a nascent trend of technology giants reducing their use of external labor for non-technical roles. Google made a similar move with its security staff late last year.
According to a media report, Apple will bring “the majority” of its contractual security staffers in-house. Read More

TCTV

President Obama proposed in January the first federal standard for data breaches, requiring that companies notify customers of privacy-related breaches within 30 days of discovery. Other standards and regulations exist (47 states at last count had some form of regulation regarding breach disclosure), but there is currently no federal standard to act as a uniform baseline. Read More

GitLab calls itself the open-source GitHub that companies can run on their own servers. Like GitHub, it offers an open source git repository. Also like GitHub, it has a cat creature mascot.
“But sometimes you want your hub protected on your own servers, behind your own firewall for certain geographic reasons,” Dutch co-founder of GitLab Sytse Sijbrandij told me over the phone from… Read More

Crowdsourcing company CrowdFlower allows businesses to tap into a distributed workforce of 5 million contributors for basic tasks like sentiment analysis. Today it’s releasing some of that data to the public through its new Data for Everyone initiative.
Founder and CEO Lukas Biewald (a friend of mine from college) told me that last year, the company quietly began asking some of its… Read More

Last August, payments startup Square acquired San Francisco-based food delivery startup Caviar for a reported $90 million. Since then, the company has been growing fast, both in terms of order volume and the size of the internal team.
For Square, the acquisition follows a trend of diversifying the company’s portfolio of products and services. As it moves beyond just providing a card… Read More

Wealthfront, the automated investment services company that competes with traditional financial advisory behemoths like Fidelity, has today crossed the $2 billion mark in terms of assets managed.
The achievement for a company, which two years ago was managing approximately $500 million in client assets, is impressive, and it makes Wealthfront the first in its space to rake in that much… Read More

Pebble’s extra bump from the Pebble Time Steel announcement has put it over the edge, helping it break the record for most-funded project of all time on Kickstarter. The Pebble Time campaign beats out the Coolest Cooler, a camper cooler with various tech-friendly additional features. It’s currently sitting at just under $13.5 million, with 24 days left in the campaign still to… Read More

Google today announced that Chrome 42 will be the last version of its mobile browser to run on devices that still use Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), which launched in 2011.
Chrome will still continue to run on these devices, but Google will freeze development, and Android 4.0 users will not receive any updates beyond Chrome 42, which is set for release in mid-April 2015. Version 42… Read More

Primacy is the most important decision facing news editors on a daily basis. What stories do they want to bring attention to? Newspapers can showcase their best content by placing it on the front page, above the fold. Television news programs can place it on the chyron at the bottom of the screen, boldly demanding the attention of viewers. And websites showcase their important stories with… Read More